Knife Edge
by Igorina
Summary: All bounty hunters have their story. He just didn't plan to revisit his own with Her in tow. But hey, a job's a job and he's always known that fate would call him back to the knife edge one day. Will feature Cad/Aurra, though this won't be the main focus .
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer:** The Star Wars universe belongs to George Lucas, I own none of the characters or settings to be found herein. No profit is being made from this work of fanfiction.

**A/N: **A few people expressed an interest in hearing more about the Bane backstory hinted at in Good for What Ails You. This fic will be an attempt to elaborate. The intro chapter is set in Bane's past, but subsequent ones will feature a fair bit of past/present time skipping (I'll try to avoid confusion).

**-o0O0o-**

There are moments when fate pauses on a knife edge and waits for a decision.

The young Duros knew instinctively that this was one of those moments. It wasn't just about taking the blaster, dull and worn, from its place in the bottom drawer; it was about what would come after. Leave it be and life would trundle on in the same trajectory as it always had been: a job at the ore processing plant like his father, a wife who'd gradually start to bear a disturbing similarity to his mother, a few sons for whom his greatest ambition would be a slightly better job at the ore processing plant. A small life, safe and predictable. Take it and he'd be hurtled off that course and into the unknown: the only certainty that the future – however long that might last for him – wouldn't involve watching his life pass by one oxide load at a time.

"Well?" Garu was nervous, his excitement, so strong a few hours ago, turning to fear as teenage fantasy began to look like it might actually start transitioning into reality.

He continued to stare at his late Great Uncle's most carefully guarded secret.

"Cad, maybe we shouldn't do this."

The younger of the two youths glanced up at his second cousin and was struck for the first time by the conscious realisation that while all their schemes seemed to originate with Garu, it was always left to him, Cad, to make the first breach in the barrier between possibility and actuality. Garu lived in his own head. If it wasn't for Cad all of the flights of fancy would stay there. No distilling spirits in a can under the bed. No selling the mildly toxic result to the other kids on the block. No sneaking out to that Togrutan titty bar. No riding on 'borrowed' speeder bikes. This time it would be no different. Garu had seen the Wanted poster and the words 'twenty-thousand credits' and had pictured himself as one of those anti-hero guns for hire you saw in Coruscant holos. A romantic daydream. Left to his own devices it would only be a few days before he was dreaming of life as a swoop racer or troubadour instead.

"Cad?"

He said nothing, his attention back on the blaster and the matter of his destiny.

On the floor below their mothers quarrelled about who was going to get the old man's crockery.

"It probably doesn't even work." Garu was pleading now.

Cad knew it wasn't true. He'd peered through the crack in the door while his Great Uncle had stripped down and cleaned the thing. You didn't do that to a broken piece of equipment, especially when it was a reminder of the bad old days before the family had made the leap from criminal underbelly to lower class respectability. No, the old man must have kept it out of some residual fear that a figure from the past might show up one day to settle some long hidden score.

"We could go to Arizio's," Garu said. "There's this new green girl there. Nobody knows what species she is, but Fin Mo says that she looks a bit like that Twi'lek from _Palace of Sin_ without the lekku, he says that she'll do anything for a couple of deathsticks, we could go and see if it's true. Or we could go to the track, I heard that Jirana's racing again..."

Garu's prattling went on, but Cad filtered it out. He could not however filter out the squabbling women downstairs, the clank of the freight trucks, the whirring of the ore processing plant or the dreary rhythmic trudge of honest working men towards it.

Twenty thousand credits. It wasn't a fortune, but it wouldn't be _that_.

He made his choice.


	2. Chapter 1

**A/N: **Thank you to everybody who read and reviewed the last chapter. Responses to individual comments are at the bottom of this instalment.

**-o0O0o-**

As the display boards extended the predicted delay from thirty minutes to forty-five Bane exhaled with irritation, breath turning to mist as soon as it hit the air. Even here in bowels of the accursed planet's only spaceport it was freezing: the temperature only just high enough for a Duros without thermal clothing to avoid physical damage.

Aware that he was he was being watched by at least twelve different sets of eyes, he suppressed the urge to shudder and draw his duster more tightly around him. It wouldn't do to show any sign of discomfort or discomposure: not here where his identity was plain for all to see.

He wanted a drink: hot vobine milk with Corellian brandy. However, one whiff of the last one the Whiphid at the concessions stand had served up had been enough to tell his olfactory receptors that it was laced with four types of sedative and two varieties of disinhibitor. Somebody had paid the Whiphid to spike it; doubtless one or more of the beings currently loitering around the seating area. His gaze flicked from a solitary Wookiee studying what looked to be some kind of ancient treasure map, to trio of Human mechanics, to a tableful of Weequay pirates (Ohnaka Gang), to a squat, six-eyed creature who seemed to be in the process of trying to devouring the duraplastic chair that it was sitting on. The smart money was on the pirates, but you could never tell. With the exception of Six Eyes none of them looked particularly pleased to be there, but then nobody in full possession of their senses came to Ice Point unless they could possibly help it.

Embedded in the rock and permafrost of Zofren's narrow band of equatorial tundra, the port served an odd combination of geo-scientists, smugglers, haunted loners and respectable merchant men who didn't quite have enough fuel to make it to the next outpost on the run. It was drab, spartan and cold, with even the in-port quarters (rented by the half-day and exorbitantly priced) failing to provide anything that could be reasonably described as heat. In the quarter century since he'd first walked out of the Number Five docking bay and into the main dome, the place hadn't changed a bit: beige walls, grey floors, a clothing supplier, a hardware outlet, a droid mechanic, a booking agent, three bars, two brothels (the only warm places in the whole damned complex) and a few grim-faced vendors on the concourse. The only difference was that his first visit had been accompanied with a sense of wonder that seemed entirely alien him now.

He'd been so young.

And stupid.

As the tannoy reminded visitors that droids weren't permitted to enter the habitation areas, he grudgingly allowed his mind to drift back to the events that had led him there the first time.

**-o0O0o-**

_In the end it had been so much easier than he'd thought it would be. Anticlimactic, almost._

_The aim. The shot. The recoil. The body clattering to the metal walkway._

_Nervous agitation followed by an odd sort of blankness. Wasn't killing another sentient supposed to be difficult?_

_A retching noise drew his attention away from existential matters and back towards his older cousin, who was vomiting up his liquid courage behind a section of waste disposal chute. He hadn't wanted Garu to follow him to the capital; had told him that he'd buy him a second hand swoop bike with some of the bounty money if he stayed where he was. However, for the first time ever Garu had adamantly refused. For a while this had puzzled Cad. His cousin didn't want to be a bounty hunter, not really. It was only the image that had ever appealed to him. Then he'd realised that the insistence on coming had had nothing to do with the killing or the credits and everything to do with the fear that Cad would leave him alone and never come back. _

_It was a reasonable fear. Cad hadn't planned on going back._

_How could he? The killing itself might have failed to take the expected toll, but he knew that he couldn't return to the family home and sit at the dinner table with his parent and say that the credits had come from a month long labouring job in the south. They'd never believe it... though they'd desperately try to pretend that they did. They were simple not stupid, and the prospect of meeting his mother's eyes was one he wasn't prepared to entertain._

_He looked again at Garu who'd finished vomiting and was now emitting strange choked noises. He should have left in the night without a word, but hadn't quite felt able to go without saying goodbye to his only real friend— only real *living* friend, he mentally corrected himself, thinking briefly of Prew. She would have probably followed him here too, but he doubted that she'd have freaked out like Garu._

_"Help me get him into the box."_

_The sharpness of the command was enough to snap Garu out of his fog of panic. Thankfully he wasn't as squeamish about handling corpses as he was about making them and they soon had the Rodian's remains in the sealed repulsor lift hand cart they'd swiped from a building site a few days earlier._

_"Cad, what if someone saw." The voice was small, quiet._

_"They didn't." He'd made sure of that, chosen a back alley in the middle of the main industrial district that didn't have any windows or doors opening out into it. "Besides, it's not as if any of the police round here would care. They'd just take the body and claim the money themselves." After taking the blaster and dispensing a sound beating, of course, but he saw no reason to mention this._

_"Oh." Garu didn't sound certain, but Cad didn't care._

_"When we get to the club, let me do the talking."_

_Their journey wasn't a long one. The Loco red light district was only a few miles away from the Sharrd Industrial Park, easily accessible by the city's public transit system. As far as the other commuters were concerned the two scruffily attired Duros boys with a hand cart were nothing out of the ordinary, just another couple of menial workers on a job. _

_They alighted on a bustling street illuminated by the kind of harsh neon that only serves highlight the grime of the place. Hookers, hustlers, spice dealers, low lives and thugs: here was where the dregs swam. As he gazed cautiously around it struck Cad that a clever predator could use a shoal like this as cover._

_"Come on," he said to Garu, who was already gawping at a blue Twi'lek in a gauzy see-through dress. "You can look at the females later."_

_The other youth grudgingly tore his eyes away from the Twi'lek and began to follow as Cad led the way towards a building with a giant illuminated snake's head on the frontage: The Gold Serpent, de facto headquarters of Don Netro's underworld operation. Outside, a queue of expensively dressed Nautolans and Duros was already forming, a mass of giggling, jittery herd animals. Rich kids slumming it, he thought contemptuously, as he and Garu passed them. Neither received slightest bit of attention from the club goers, who doubtless deemed the pair beneath their notice._

_One hand on the blaster in his pocket, Cad led them down a narrow passageway to the club's back entrance. When they were half-way between main strip and back road a figure stepped out of the shadows and into their path. A Weequay, rail thin and reeking of alcohol and stale piss._

_"Well, well, well, what do we 'ave 'ere." He leered, revealing a rotting set of teeth, held up a smashed bottle... and froze as his eyes met the younger boy's._

_Cad would never be quite sure what the Weequay saw there, but it was enough to make him emit a strangled cry and dive behind a large metal dumpster. For a split second he considered pursuing the would-be mugger and putting a bolt in his head, but decided against it. The last thing he needed was Garu having another episode._

_"Come on," he ordered, glancing back at his cousin. In the gloom of the passage he couldn't clearly see his features, but his breath, quick and gasping suggested that he was close to panic again._

_The door to the back of the club was open when they got there, a middle-aged Rodian female standing just behind the threshold and taking short, angry puffs on a rhyll pipe. She was armed, but not heavily: a lookout rather than a guard._

_"What do you want?" she demanded, voice nasal and gurgling at the same time. The pipe was obviously a long term fixture._

_Garu opened his mouth, shut it and then made an incoherent spluttering sound._

_Cad reached for the lid on the hand cart and flipped it open._

_She looked from Cad to the corpse and back again, the expression on her face becoming a pale echo of the one the Weequay had worn just before fleeing. She took a long, deep drag on the pipe. "You better bring it in."_

_Don Netro's seat of power was a red couch on raised platform towards the back of a large, expensively tiled chamber. He was, Cad saw, an old man, but not a decrepit one. The skin on his bare green arms was puckered and covered in age blotches, but it overlay a seam of wiry muscle. As Nautolans went Netro had never been one of the bulkier specimens, but he clearly hadn't left the more physical aspect of the job to his lackeys either. To his left and right sat two beautiful Togrutan girls, decked out jewels and fabrics that had to have been shipped in from the Deep Core. Various beings milled about the floor of the chamber, all moving with a slow careful wariness, as if one indelicate move or sound would bring down wrath from above... Perhaps it would._

_Speaking quickly, in a dialect of Huttese that Cad couldn't follow, the Rodian woman gestured to the two youths and their burden. When she'd finished Netro dismissed her with a gesture and she scurried quietly away._

_As the Nautolan turned his gaze towards him, Cad found himself trying to work out what the best mode of escape would be if things turned ugly. The Rodian woman had let him keep hold of the blaster; but the five heavily armed Zabraks stationed at the chamber's only visible exit would be more than a match for him... Perhaps if he shot Netro dead the entourage would be in too much of a hurry to grab as much loot as they could that they'd let him slip away. The guards didn't look like the Loyal After Death sort._

_As if sensing the direction that his thoughts were taking the old man gave a chuckle and stood, the outlines of a personal force shield shimmering as he did so. "What's your name, boy?"_

_"Cad." As he said the word it occurred to him that it might have been better to call himself something else, a name other than the one his parents had given him. It was too late now though, Netro was already saying it to himself, face speculative._

_"A good name," he concluded after a few repetitions._

_Cad said nothing. He didn't like Netro or the air of faux-fatherly cheerfulness he seemed to be trying to adopt. The two young Togrutan girls with the silver collars around their necks hinted that he wasn't into young Duros boys in *that* way, but there was still something unpleasantly acquisitive about his gaze._

_"I'm Garu," his cousin piped up, voice scared and excited in about equal measure._

_"A good name too." The Nautolan smiled indulgently at him, before returning his attention to Cad. "You did well to snare him so quickly. Our little thief was proving quite elusive."_

_Cad shrugged. The truth was that it hadn't been difficult. He'd figured that, having been stupid enough to disappear straight after pilfering from his boss's jewellery box, Netro's former errand runner wouldn't have the sense or the guts to try and blend into the sea of Rodian service workers who filled the city's commercial quarter: on show but invisible. No, a being like that who didn't have enough ready cash to flee the zone would try to hole up somewhere quiet and out of sight until he could figure out how to change gems into credits without Netro getting wind of it. It had been easy enough to narrow down the possible locations after that, and the Rodian hadn't done a particularly good job of trying to conceal himself in Sharrd._

_"The poster said there was a twenty thousand credit reward."_

_Another chuckle. "Straight down to business, I see... But I wonder, how would you like to triple it?"_

_Cad's eyes narrowed. "What do you want me to do?"_

_"Have you ever heard of the Zofren System?"_

_He hadn't, but he was prepared to be educated._

**TBC**

**-o0O0o-**

**Stilwater Rundeepo: **I'm writing young!Cad as being about 15/16 years old in this one (though he's perhaps a little small-looking for his age at this point). In this version of his backstory I picture him as starting out as a smart, rather calculating youth who feels resentful of his lot and is willing to cross lines that others are either too moral, too scared or too gripped with inertia to step over. He's not the ruthless, stone cold contract killer we meet in TCW yet, but I hope to tell a story about how he gets there (or at least some of the way there).

**Laloga: **Thank you :) Young Cad's definitely not one to just accept the hand that he feels he's been dealt. He doesn't have the ruthlessness he'll display as the Galaxy's No. 1 Bounty Hunter quite yet, but the calculation and will to act are certainly there.

**Pronker: **Thanks :) I think that he's probably more contemptuous of people who can imagine alternatives to the way their life is but never act (his cousin) than people who simply seem (to him) to lack imagination (his parents).


End file.
